You jolt awake from a nightmare you don’t quite remember in a cold sweat. You can recall a loud scuttling sound, but nothing else.
Getting out of bed, you walk to the bathroom, and look in the mirror. Your hair is a bit disheveled, there’s a hint of purple under your eyes, and you’re a little pale from being startled so badly but otherwise you look fine.
But you don’t feel fine.
There’s something that feels ominous and impending, but you don’t quite know what. Nothing seems unorthodox on the surface, but that doesn’t stop your gut feeling that something is going to happen, and it’s going to be bad.
You try to chalk it up to you getting your cage a bit rattled from the nightmare.
Then you feel something in your eye.
From a distance, it looks like a rather thick and dark eyelash, but upon closer inspection, you notice that it’s a leg. A leg that belongs to a bug. The type of bug is undetermined, but even if it was, it wouldn’t stop the dry heave from escaping you as you try not to vomit.
You gently pluck the leg out of your eye and rinse it down the drain. You decide at this very point in time that you will forget this ever happened. You will go back to sleep, and you will think it’s all a dream.
That’s when you begin to itch.
Not all of you at once, and not a terrible itching, but it’s there, and you can’t ignore it. It starts with your forearm, just a slight itch, nothing unusual.
Then it spreads to your hand, then your shoulder. It feels like people are dragging feathers across your arm, but there are no people, and there are no feathers. Just you, and your bad gut feeling.
The itching goes up your neck and on your ears and begins to bloom on your stomach. The itching now feels like several mosquito bites across your body. Your other arm beings to succumb to itching.
You feel as if you cannot scratch fast enough before another part of you starts itching and your attention is directed toward it.
By now, the entire surface of you feels as if you have a severe case of poison ivy. You’ve scratched yourself raw in many places and you feel like you’ve gone half insane with itching. Pushing your nails down, you scratch harder. Then you feel a bump behind your upper arm. A rather large bump, about a little less than the size of an egg. You touch it gingerly, suddenly being able to ignore the itch a bit with the curiosity that floods you.
The bump starts to move.
It jolts forward, moving down to just above your elbow. Stifling a scream, you stumble back, as if that would get you away from the mysterious object beneath your skin.
Looking down, you see several other bumps on your skin all over your arms and legs. They’re on your stomach and chest. You observe your face in the mirror. There is a small bump under your eye and a bulging one on the side of your neck. They’re beginning to scuttle about, when the first one you found, now on your forearm, bursts open almost audibly. A large beetle crawls out of the crater in your arm, covered in blood and pus. The other bumps on your body follow suit and begin bursting as well. You can’t hold this one back as you scream. Frantically, you swat at the bugs, trying to get them off you, but there are so many you feel overwhelmed, to put it lightly.
Your mind can’t handle the horror. Everything begins to appear to darken and your limbs feel numb. You sit down hard on the floor, watching your perforated flesh spill dark red all over the floor. Your head feels heavy and numb, your vision is now a small window of light. For whatever reason (probably blood loss), this is hilarious to you, and you nearly lose consciousness while giggling to yourself quietly.
All you know to be true at this very moment is nothing but the loud scuttling sound that fills your head.